Weininger's suicide caused a significant stir in Viennese society. The newspapers ran pages of commentary about him, and his reputation rose from that of obscure controversialist to national celebrity in a matter of days. Copies of Geschlecht and Charakter started to sell in great numbers. It is rumored that some of the Wittgensteins attended his funeral at the Matzleinsdorf Cemetery, which took place, like Christ's crucifixion, during a partial eclipse of the sun. All the Wittgensteins read his book.
Recent studies have documented the way in which high-profile "media" suicides can be held responsible for triggering so-called copycat deaths. In the month of August 1962, for instance, the U.S. suicide rate increased by 303 (a jump of 12 percent) after Marilyn Monroe took her fatal overdose. But this is not a new phenomenon. The suicide rate soared also in Vienna following the sensational double suicide of Crown Prince Rudolf and his mistress Marie Vetsera at Mayerling in 1889, and over a hundred years before that Goethe's novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) had to be banned in cities across Europe when it was decided that the fictional hero's suicide was responsible for a spate of copycat deaths among the lovelorn young men of Italy, Leipzig and Copenhagen.
And thus it was in Vienna after Otto Weininger's death in October 1903. If Hans Wittgenstein really killed himself, the deed was most probably enacted while Weininger was still alive, but the acceptance of his fate, the declaration of it by his family in Vienna, came afterward, in the immediate wake of Weininger's public death--a wake whose silent ripples reached far beyond the Schwarzspanierstrasse, perhaps even to the very edges of that little restaurant table in the Berlin Gaststube where, seven months later, Rudolf sat edgily eyeing his last glass of milk.
AT HOME WITH THE WITTGENSTEINS
The Wittgenstein Winter Palais on the Alleegasse, which Jerome Stonborough first visited sometime between the dramas of Hans's disappearance and Rudi's suicide, must have seemed of a different order of opulence to anything that he had experienced as a glove importer on Broadway. That first visit was likely to have been as a guest at one of the Wittgensteins' private concerts to which he would have been invited as a new friend of Rudolf Maresch, a doctor married to one of Gretl's cousins. The front elevation, which stretched more than fifty yards along the Alleegasse, was from the outside both imposing and austere: nine bays on the first floor, seven below, with high arches at either end. Jerome entered by the gate on the right-hand side, through heavy oak doors, attended by a uniformed porter whose simple task was to rise from his stool and bow to arriving guests. In the forecourt, he could not have failed to notice a colossal fountain statue (the work of the Croatian expressionist Ivan Mestrovic) nor, on entering the gloomy high-ceilinged hall, an elaborate mosaic floor, carved paneling, frescoes depicting scenes from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and an imposing piece by Auguste Rodin. Straight ahead of him, between two stone arches, six steps, supported by marble balustrades, ran up to impressive glass double doors. These were attended (on the near side) by a full-sized statue of a Teuton doffing his cap in a gesture of welcome, and opened (on the far side) by a liveried valet, garbed, as one Palais guest remembered, in "a uniform reminiscent of an Austrian hunting outfit from the Steiermark." From here visitors were led up a long flight of wide, red-carpeted, marble steps (illumined in the daytime by sunlight streaming through the domed glass roof high above) to a cloakroom where servants waited to take the coats.
Private concerts took place sometimes in the Hall but more often in the Musiksaal on the first floor. This was the most splendid of all the Wittgenstein salons. Here, plush hunting tapestries were draped from ceiling to floor, except at one end where the whole wall was taken up with the pipe case of a two-manual pedal-organ, richly decorated with paintings of knights and minstrels in the Pre-Raphaelite style. In the center of the room two Bosendorfer Imperial grand pianos faced one another, keyboard to keyboard, while from a high black plinth frowned the squatting, naked figure of Ludwig van Beethoven, carved from a single block of white marble by Max Klinger in preparation for his celebrated Beethoven Monument. A set of ten gilt standard lamps was distributed around and about, but they were seldom switched on as the room was usually kept in darkness. Even by day its shutters were closed, the sole source of light being that of two small lamps clipped to the lecterns of each piano. If Jerome had needed the "rest room" he could not have found himself in a more convenient spot, for it was one of Karl Wittgenstein's obsessions that each of the main rooms of his house should have a lavatory leading off it, wherein the taps and sinks were ornately gilded.
The Wittgensteins' musical soirees were, in the words of Hermine, "always festive occasions, almost solemn, and the beautiful music was the essential thing." The quality of music making was first class, as the musicians who played there ranked among the most distinguished of their day. The violinist Joseph Joachim, a pupil of Mendelssohn and the first to play Brahms's Violin Concerto, was a first cousin of Karl's and he (remembering to pick from among his many violins the famous Guarneri del Gesu violin of 1742 that Karl had generously loaned him) played always two or three times a year at the Palais and used the Musiksaal for rehearsals whenever his quartet was in Vienna. The guests--scientists, diplomats, artists, writers and composers--were as distinguished as the musicians assembled to entertain them. Brahms came to listen to a performance of his Clarinet Quintet here; Richard Strauss attended several concerts in the Musiksaal and so did the composers Schoenberg, Zemlinsky and Gustav Mahler, although the last of these was not invited back after insulting his hosts by storming off in pique muttering, "Nothing more should be played now that we have heard the Beethoven 'Archduke' Trio." Another regular visitor was Eduard Hanslick, Wagner's nemesis, regarded until his death in 1904 as the most powerful and most feared music critic in Vienna. To a letter from Mrs. Wittgenstein inquiring about his health, Hanslick replied shortly before he died:
Dear and esteemed and gracious lady,
Your letter, so beautiful, touched my heart with such warmth, a sentiment that it happily and gratefully retained for the whole day. Those splendid evenings for which I have you to thank passed in lively reminiscence before my eyes. The magnificent music, the toasts, anticipated with pleasurable excitement, given by your sage and eloquent husband, the deep pleasure you took in rapt attention to the music and the rest!
My health, which seems to maintain a certain equilibrium, allows me to hope that I shall be able to thank you in person in May for so kindly inquiring about me.
With the greatest respect, yours Ed. Hanslick
If Jerome was made to feel insecure in such rarefied Viennese milieus, he would not have admitted to it at the time (this would happen later); instead his awkwardness erupted in fits of brooding jealousy at the apparent ease with which Gretl chatted to other men during the period of their courtship. She interpreted these moods as a manifestation of his earnest love and not (as hindsight would later assure her) as a serious warning of the psychosis that would darken, destabilize, subsume and eventually destroy her marriage. Gretl's obstinacy had inspired her to marry someone from far outside the Wittgenstein circle, but Jerome Ston-borough was not only a stranger to the Wittgensteins, he was a stranger to all of Vienna, a stranger even in his native America, a man of no particular domain, unaccountable, hard to please and hard to measure. Karl may have been dimly satisfied to learn that his son-in-law was a man of means whose sister was married to a Guggenheim, but a few inquiries among his smart friends in America (these included the steel billionaires Andrew Carnegie and Charles Schwab) would surely have alerted him to Jerome's change of name, to the Steinberger bankruptcy and to the ineffable feebleness of William Guggenheim.
When Gretl bought a bijou castle on the shores of Lake Traun, Marguerite Cunliffe-Owen, a gossip columnist writing under the nom de plume Marquise de Fontenoy for the Washington Post, tried, without success, to find something out about her mysterious husband:
Who is Dr. Stonborough? He is the purchaser of the vil
la and also the Chateau Toscana, which belonged to the long-missing Archduke John of Austria, and to his mother, the late Grand Duchess Maria Antonia of Tuscany. Dr. Stonborough is described in the announcement of the purchase as "the well-known American multimillionaire." But I cannot find his name in any of the standard works of reference, nor even in that Locator which gives the names of the members of the leading clubs, and of the so-called smart sets of all the principal cities of the United States.
As for Gretl's siblings they detested their new brother-in-law with an intensity that grew with the passing years; her two youngest brothers, Paul and Ludwig, known collectively as die Buben (the Boys), especially so. When Jerome first met them they were teenagers, but still being treated by the rest of the family as something of a collective afterthought.
THE BOYS
In adult life Paul Wittgenstein was far more famous than his younger brother, but nowadays it is the other way around: Ludwig, or Lucki to the family, has become an icon of the twentieth century--the handsome, stammering, tortured, incomprehensible philosopher, around whose formidable personality an extraordinary cult developed in the years that followed his death in 1951--a cult, incidentally, whose membership includes many who have never opened his books or tried to understand a single line of his thought. "Schmarren!" (Trash!), is how Paul described it all. But such criticism did not dent the brothers' friendship. When Ludwig's treatise, Tractatus Logko-Phtlosophicus, was first published (a book in which the author claimed in his preface to have found the final solution to most of the world's most puzzling philosophical problems), he presented a copy to Paul, inscribing it: "To my dear brother Paul for Christmas 1922. If this book be worthless, may it soon vanish without trace."
At the time of Gretl and Jerome's courtship, Paul--attractive, neurotic, learned, nature-loving and intense--was seventeen years old and on the point of taking his final school examinations at the classical Gymnasium in Wiener Neustadt. Ludwig, a year and a half younger, was lodging during term time with a family called Strigl in the provincial town of Linz where, by day, he attended lessons at the Staatsoberrealschule a semiclassical state secondary school of 300 pupils. According to the recollection of one of his fellow pupils, the majority of the school's teachers were
mentally deranged, and quite a few ended their days as honest-to-God lunatics; their collars were unkempt... Their external appearance exuded uncleanness, they were the product of a proletariat denuded of all personal independence of thought, distinguished by unparalleled ignorance and most admirably fitted to become the pillars of an effete system of government which, thank God, is now a thing of the past.
That pupil--just six days older than Lucki--was Adolf Hitler.
It is unlikely that either Ludwig or Hitler had, at that time, the slightest inkling of the potential rise of the other. At school both were misfits; both insisted on addressing their fellow pupils with the formal German Sie as opposed to the informal du used by everyone else. Hitler, who suffered a hereditary weakness of the lungs, was regarded by his teachers, not as a future Fuhrer of Germany, but as a problematic dunce who failed even to achieve his final-year certificate, while Ludwig, whose corresponding ailment was a painful extrusion of the intestines (commonly called a hernia), was at best considered an average scholar whose grades, in most subjects, gave frequent cause for concern.
At home in Urfahr, a suburb of Linz, Hitler's mother indulged her son with unquestioning confidence in all his abilities, while in Vienna the Wittgenstein family was slow to acknowledge any of the talents of its two youngest members. Paul's piano playing--which inspired most of the young man's waking thoughts--was dismissed as unsubtle and obsessive. "Not as accomplished as Hans," they said; but Paul had at least succeeded, where his younger brother had failed, in gaining entry to the academic Gymnasium at Wiener Neustadt. Ludwig, who had constructed a working model of a sewing machine from wooden sticks and wire at the age of ten and whose interests during his youth were more practical and technical than academic, managed to pass his entrance examination to the far less academic Realschule only after a period of intense extra tuition.
At first Karl had tried to stop Paul and Ludwig from going to school at all, insisting that they be educated, like the rest of his children, privately at home in the subjects of Latin and mathematics. The rest (geography, history, science, whatever) they would have to pick up for themselves by reading books, for school time, in Karl's view, was wasted time; much better, he believed, for his children to take a healthy walk or engage in sport. It was only after Hans's disappearance, when the atmosphere of the Wittgenstein home had become insufferable, that Karl finally relented, allowing his two youngest boys to enter the public school system. But by then it was already too late--too late for Ludwig to pass his exams, and too late for either to be properly trained in the art of human relations. Their private tutoring had always kept them apart from other children of their age, and although their mother had tried to encourage them to play with the servants' children, her ploy failed to impress either and was greatly resented. Playmates were few and as a consequence all the Wittgenstein children developed into hardened individualists, who struggled throughout their lives to make and maintain meaningful relationships.
In boyhood Paul and Ludwig fought with each other as most brothers fight. At one time they vied jealously for the attentions of a boy called Wolfrum. Paul, a natural anarchist and mischief-maker, enjoyed leading his younger brother into trouble, but they were close in age and, in those days, close also in friendship. How severely their brothers' suicides affected them cannot be gauged. As the family's two youngest members, they must have been sheltered to some degree from the worst of the fallout. They were also considerably younger than Hans and Rudolf. Ludwig maintained a few good memories of Rudolf, but of Hans (who was twelve years his senior and who disappeared from home when he was just thirteen) one suspects that he remembered little. But the Buben cannot have remained entirely oblivious to the chronic atmosphere of their home during those years and both of them would, at various stages in their lives, come dangerously close to killing themselves. Ludwig, in a scribbled reminiscence of his childhood, claimed to have first indulged thoughts of suicide in his tenth or eleventh year--in other words in 1900 or 1901, before the Hans and Rudolf tragedies.
The Wittgenstein story is one of many suicides--an aunt and a cousin also ended their lives in this way--but it should not be inferred (as is sometimes stated) that this way of death was considered acceptable, honorable or even normal to an early-twentieth-century Viennese. Karl, as has been shown, was ashamed of both Hans's and Rudolf's behavior; Otto Weininger's father felt the same about his son; even Weininger himself wrote shortly before his death: "Suicide is not a sign of courage but of cowardice, even if it is the least of the cowardly acts." Ludwig was ashamed at times of not having killed himself, but the reason why he and indeed Paul never did so was precisely because they lacked this form of cowardice. "I know," wrote Ludwig, "that to kill oneself is always a dirty thing to do. Surely one cannot will one's own destruction and anybody who has visualized what is in practice involved knows that suicide is always a rushing of one's own defenses. But nothing is worse than to be forced to take oneself by surprise." This ambiguous attitude, shared by Paul, was a far cry from the sense of shame that their father felt about the suicides of Hans and Rudolf.
Many years after the events with which this chapter chiefly deals, when Paul was retired and living in New York he used, every day, to take long walks from his nineteenth-floor apartment at Riverside Drive up to George Washington Bridge, across to the other side and back again. On one such occasion his attention was drawn by a crowd that had assembled upon the bridge in order to dissuade a desperate man from throwing himself off. When he realized what they were up to, Paul burst through the mob waving his walking stick. "If this man wishes to die, let him do so. What business is it of yours to tell him how he should or shouldn't end his life?" In the fracas that followed, the man, finding himself no l
onger at the center of attention, silently withdrew from his precarious position on the bridge and was neither seen nor heard of again.
Like all the Wittgensteins, Paul and Ludwig were exceptionally musical. Ludwig learned to play both violin and piano and later trained himself as a clarinettist; but he always felt overshadowed by his elder siblings. He once dreamed that he was standing on a station platform overhearing Paul telling Hermine how thrilled Jerome had been by his (Ludwig's) musical gifts. The next morning Ludwig wrote it down:
It seemed that I had sung so wonderfully during the Bacchante by Mendelssohn the day before ... I had sung extraordinarily expressively and with particularly expressive gestures. Paul and Hermine appeared to agree entirely with Jerome's praise. Jerome apparently said again and again: "What a talent!" ... The whole was underpinned by smugness. I woke up and was irritated or rather ashamed at my vanity.
The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War Page 4